Page 100 of Confessions

“I’ve been busy.” He leaned one hip against the truck’s fender and waited. “So what do you say?”

“Just let me grab my suit.”

The apartment was empty and Ben waited downstairs while Carlie dashed into her room, stripped out of her work clothes and threw on a one-piece sea-green swimsuit. She couldn’t believe that he was actually waiting for her. Her heart pounded as she stepped into a pair of shorts and a sleeveless blouse with long tails that she tied under her breasts. She ran a brush over her hair, touched up her lipstick and was back downstairs in less than ten minutes. She felt breathless and flushed as she wrote her parents a quick note and let Shadow inside.

Once they were in the parking lot, he unlocked the truck and held open the passenger door for her. She climbed into the sun-baked interior and wondered why, after hearing nothing from him for the past few days, he’d decided to pick up where they’d left off. Or had he?

With a roar the old truck started and Ben eased the Ford into traffic.

“Did something happen?” she finally asked.

His brows fastened together as he squinted through the windshield. Frowning, he reached across her, into the glove compartment and extracted a pair of sunglasses. “Happen?” he asked, sliding the shades onto the bridge of his nose.

“Well, I just figured that you didn

’t want to see me again.”

“You figured wrong,” he said with a trace of agitation. He stopped for a red light, rolled down the window and rested his elbow on the ledge. “Besides, I thought I should make sure that I wasn’t stepping on Kevin’s toes.”

She nearly dropped through the seat. “What’s he got to do with this?”

“Nothing. But I wanted to double-check.”

“Double-check? This is my life—” she began, but held her tongue. It didn’t matter anyway. Obviously Kevin understood how she felt and Ben was here with her now. Still, the thought galled her.

As they drove through the outskirts of town, Ben fiddled with the dial for the radio and found a station that mixed old songs with newer recordings.

“I thought that didn’t work.”

“Fixed it.” He sent her a quick glance as they approached the sawmill. Ben’s expression changed and his jaw grew hard as the truck sped along the chain-link fence surrounding the yard. Thousands of board-feet of lumber were sorted according to grade in huge stacks and a mountain of logs waited to be milled. Trucks, many bearing the logo of Fitzpatrick Logging, roared in and out of the yard and men in hard hats waved to the drivers.

Cranes hovered over huge piles of logs and forklifts carried planed lumber from sheds. The shift was changing and men sauntered in and out of the gate. They laughed and smoked, shouted to friends and brushed the sawdust from their shirts and jeans.

Kevin’s sleek Corvette was parked in the lot between the dusty pickups and station wagons.

“So why don’t you work at the mill?” she asked, sensing him tense as they sped past the activity at the sawmill.

“Don’t you think two Powells bowing down and paying homage to H.G. III is enough?”

“It’s a good job.”

“I prefer the hours at the Bait and Fish.”

She slid a glance in his direction and noticed the way his hands gripped the steering wheel—as if he were going to rip it from its column.

“You don’t like the Monroes much, do you?”

“I try not to think about them.”

She lifted a brow and he caught the movement.

“Okay. It’s like this. I just don’t appreciate the way Monroe does business. He lives in a mansion in some ritzy neighborhood in San Francisco, sent his son to private schools, flies into Gold Creek in a company helicopter once, maybe twice a week, does some rah-rahing and claps a few men on the back, then speeds back to his country club for eighteen holes of golf before he plants himself in the clubhouse. Like some damned visiting royalty.”

“He’s rich.”

“So that gives him the right to use the sweat of people’s backs to pay for his yacht harbored in the marina?”

“That’s the way it works.”